A week before the Quebec election, we are looking increasingly at a minority government. The only questions are which party will form it, and which opposition party will hold the balance of power.

On Monday, the daily Mainstreet Research poll had the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) at 30.3 per cent, with the Liberals at 29.6 per cent, the Parti Québécois (PQ) at 19.2 per cent, and Québec solidaire (QS) at 17.2 per cent.

From the popular vote, Mainstreet projects the CAQ at 59 seats, four short of a majority in the 125-seat Quebec legislature, with the Liberals at 42 seats, the PQ at 17 and QS at seven. So, the right-wing CAQ would form a minority government, while the socialist-sovereigntist QS would hold the balance of power.

How would that work? Not very well, and for not very long. The CAQ would have to count on the Liberals and PQ biding their time in the National Assembly while they went through campaigns to replace their current leaders. (Quebec has had only two minority governments in the last 140 years, the first in 2007-08 under Liberal Jean Charest, and the second under the PQ’s Pauline Marois from 2012 to 2014.)

While poll aggregator Too Close to Call gives the CAQ about an 85 per cent chance of winning, that still leaves a 15 per cent possibility of a Liberal minority. At the high end of Mainstreet’s projected seat range, the Liberals could win as many as 54 seats, with the CAQ winning as few as 44. And in that eventuality, the PQ would be holding the balance of power.

These are scenarios for legislative turmoil, at the culmination of a very weird campaign.

Campaigns matter, as they say, and this one seems to have mattered for what the leaders of main parties didn’t do.

In fairness, they’ve been under the extraordinary pressure of having to perform in three televised leaders’ debates in only eight nights — the second one in English, a historical first for Quebec campaigns.

Oddly enough, the English-language debate was easily the most entertaining and informative of the three, with all four leaders doing very well in a second language.

While some of the francophone pundits in outlets such as the Quebecor tabloids complained that the English debate demeaned the standing of French as Quebec’s official language, francophone viewers took it in cosmopolitan stride.

All the leaders (except for QS co-spokesperson Manon Massé) had their share of bad moments in the debates. She was given a free ride until the final debate last Thursday, by which time QS was moving up in the polls at the expense of the other parties.

PQ Leader Jean-François Liseé demanded to know “who’s the leader of les solidaires,” drawing a rebuke from the moderator for veering away from a segment’s topic. Liseé accused QS of “hiding its program,” when it was on their website. What Liseé was seeing was QS poaching the PQ’s pro-independence vote.

This came at the end of a week when Liseé had himself pounded by CAQ leader François Legault on the immigration and identity issue, the facts on which he managed to get wrong when he said immigrants would be expelled from Quebec if they didn’t learn French within three years; kicking people out of the country is exclusively a federal jurisdiction.

Legault admitted that “I’ve made some mistakes” in the campaign. But he persisted on the identity file in the last debate, asking Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard: “Why do you want to allow a policeman to wear a hijab?”

Quebecers lived through that in the 2014 election with the PQ’s Charter of Quebec Values, where intolerance was a stand-in for independence.

“Our identity is not threatened,” Couillard replied. “It’s strong and envied everywhere in the world.”

It was his best moment — one of moral leadership — of the campaign.

And Couillard hasn’t had many good moments in this campaign.

It’s oddly ironic: Couillard deserves to be re-elected on his government’s record, but not on his performance in the campaign.

Couillard is a strong manager — the economic and fiscal numbers are the proof of that. But he does not have a strong retail game, and the Liberals have run a weak campaign.

It starts with their campaign slogan: “Pour faciliter la vie des Québécois.” To make life easier for Quebecers. It sounds like something that came out of a bad focus group.

The Quebec Liberals are also famous for their ground game, known as the Big Red Machine. But, as one 40-year veteran of Liberal war rooms puts it: “There’s no Big Red Machine out there.”

This is one of the reasons the Liberals’ numbers are holding, but also stalled, around 30 per cent. That won’t be good enough to win a Liberal minority: Couillard needs to grow to the mid-30s, mostly at the expense of Legault and the CAQ, and in a matter of days.

The Liberals might start with a new slogan: Good Government. Quite the best in the country, in fact, in terms of job creation, balancing the books and paying down debt. That’s the right message.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.